In publishing my articles in digital form, I should indicate the conditions under which I wrote them, and how they were received. And here I cannot help but evoke a tourist aspect during a distant stay. For once, it was part and parcel of my trip. In 2003, I was invited by Yolanda Westphalen, the organizer of a conference at San Marcos University in Lima on the poet César Moro and surrealism in Latin America, to give an inaugural lecture on The Surrealist Revolution and the current state of the movement in France. I was not too afraid to speak in Castilian before the most important literati of Peru, but I nevertheless took the precaution of going there armed with a translation done by a young specialized colleague, who regularly participated in my seminar sessions. By her surname, Yolanda first evoked the poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen. She was from his family, and very close to one of his daughters. But she was above all a specialist in César Moro and was devoted to the publication of the correspondence between the two poets. I also had a very good reason to go to Peru. In 1963, during a trip to South America that I made on the circuit then served in a loop by Air France, the pilot had taken the liberty of showing his passengers, as closely as possible, the ruins of Machu Picchu, the summit of Inca architecture. I could not miss the opportunity to go there... Which I did at the end of the conference, passing through Cuzco, formerly the capital of the Inca empire. And I was able to see on the spot the enigmas posed by this construction contemporary with the Spanish conquest. In Lima, the students welcomed me with complete simplicity, since I was speaking in their language, and made me know in the most concrete way the history of their country and its recent revolts. The conference proceedings were fully published by Yolanda Westphalen, as well as the reviews it gave rise to. Readers can refer to them. For my part, I reproduce below my intervention, in both languages. Subsequently, I tried to have my hostess invited by the Latin America Institute, in Paris, without success. However, I was happy to learn that she was received at the University of Toulouse, where she shared her work on both Peruvian surrealism and the feminist approach on her continent.

César Moro y el surrealismo en América Latina: actas del coloquio internacional, December 4, 5 and 6, 2003; Yolanda Westphalen, Editorial Fund of UNMSM, 2005 - 407 pages.

Download my intervention PDF: The First Year of the Surrealist Revolution followed by Last Year (Spanish)

Download my intervention PDF: The Surrealist Revolution followed by Last Year (French)

Text reprinted in: Henri Béhar, Literature and its Golem, volume II, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2010, p. 275-294.

Cf: "From the First Year of the Surrealist Revolution to 2000", in Trajectories of Modernity, Surrealism at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, edited by Germana Orlandi Cerenza, Lindau, Turin, 2004, pp. 63-81 (trans. Sofia Diaz).